Gail Shaw, who is a SQL MVP from South Africa, has an excellent blog post about this subject.

The executive summary is that having lots of conditional logic in a stored procedure tends to confuse the SQL query optimizer and it often causes problems with parameter sniffing. Parameter sniffing is…

Read more

Yesterday, Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU4, which is Build 2734, and SQL Server 2008 RTM CU7, which is Build 1818. There are over 40 included fixes in the SP1 CU4 release, across many different areas of the product. As I have said before, I really think… Read more

CPUID.COM, which hosts the wonderful CPU-Z utility, has a post up that shows where someone has taken a screenshot of what is probably an engineering sample for the upcoming Nehalem-EP (probably the Xeon 56xx series). This is the six-core, 32nm follow on to the quad-core, 45nm Xeon 55xx series… Read more

Back when I was a small tyke, I vividly remember playing an Avalon Hill board game called PanzerBlitz, which was a game about tactical armored combat on the Eastern Front in World War 2. This game was originally published in 1970, and I think I started playing it in… Read more

Here is a very good blog post from Aaron Bertrand (another SQL MVP)  on how to write and format stored procedures. As the developers I work with can attest, I am pretty picky about minor details when it comes to T-SQL in stored procedures. Sometimes these seemingly minor details can…

Read more

Prometric is offering 15% or 20%, or 25% off on selected Microsoft certification exams.  The lower level Technology Specialist (TS) exams are getting the 15% or 20% discount, while the I.T. Professional exams are getting the 25% discount.

This is certainly better than paying the full $125.00 exam fee. I… Read more